One of the results of adjunctification is that undergraduates meet few professors, if any, and many are officially advised by academic staff and who have not been faculty. As a result of this they have to pay for coaching on how to get into graduate school and things like that; there are services like The Professor Is In.
Perhaps it is at Brown, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia — depending on the era, of course — that graduate students are told writing can only happen on vacation and during large chunks of time. I, at least, never heard this until I became faculty and interacted with people who had been trained at these institutions. That kind of mistraining creates a market for coaches and consultants later on by allowing these lessons to circulate.
As we know, I am opposed to substituting popular psychology and infomercials from the pharmaceutical industry for conversation, political analysis, psychoanalysis and religion. The former are barriers, not gateways to information or keys to understanding. In academia, there is the standard advice, which one apparently now has to pay consultants for if it no longer comes with participation in one’s school.
Then there is standard advice mixed with popular psychology, which I really dislike. Or mixed with the refusal to answer more advanced questions, or give actual information. There is the repetition of standard advice, misunderstood and cheapened, and then mixed with scorn for others. There is the repetition of standard advice at people who are not in standard situations. There is also the advice given to reassure the advisor, not to enlighten the advisee.
Upon reflection I think that what is generally needed is not advice but information, and not yet more tutelage but more recognition and solidarity. I would like to recite an Upanishad in Sanskrit. I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 